Basho Blog

Free Software Can Not Be Taken Away

A few weeks ago Oracle caused a lot of confusion when they changed the makeup of the MySQL product line, including a “MySQL Classic Edition” version that does not cost money and does not include InnoDB. That combination in the product chart made many people wonder if InnoDB itself had ceased to be free in either the “free beer” or “free speech” sense. The people wondering and worrying included a few users of Innostore, the InnoDB-based storage engine that can be used with Riak.

Luckily, open source software doesn’t work that way.

Oracle didn’t really even try to do what some people thought; they just released a confusing product graph which they have since updated. The MySQL that most people think of first is MySQL Community Edition and it was not one of the editions mentioned in the chart that confused people. That version of MySQL, as well as all of the GPL components included in it such as InnoDB, remain free of cost and also available under the GPL.

This confusion eventually led to a public response from Oracle, so you can read it authoritatively if you like.

Even if someone wanted to, they couldn’t “take it back” in the way that some people feared. Existing software that has been legitimately available under an open source license such as GPL or Apache cannot retroactively be made unfree. The copyright owner might choose to not license future improvements as open source, but that which is already released in such a way cannot be undone. Oracle and Innobase aren’t currently putting new effort into Embedded InnoDB, but a new project has spun up to move it forward. If the HailDB project produces improvements of value, then future versions of Innostore may switch to using that engine instead of using the original Embedded InnoDB release.

InnoDB is available under the GPL. Innostore, as a derivative work of Embedded InnoDB, is also available under the GPL. Neither Oracle nor Basho can take that away from you.

Basho Technologies makes highly available, fault tolerant solutions for distributed systems that are easy to operate at scale for managing massive amounts of active, unstructured data. Riak from Basho is used by businesses to power their critical Web, mobile and social applications. The Basho Data Platform helps enterprises reduce the complexity of supporting Big Data applications.